Watergate (28 page)

“I’m hopin’ that’ll come to an end soon,” said LaRue.

Martha snorted. “One way or the other!” She was back at the window yet again. “Oh my! Look at the mop of curls on little John-John! Do
not
tell me that boy doesn’t belong to Mr. Agnelli. He’s not pink and pasty enough to be a real Kennedy.” She returned to the couch and her drink, exclaiming, “I just love it here! Aside from everything else, it’s
safer
. John Stennis ought to get himself out of Washington, D.C., and back home before some other colored mugger finishes him off.”

Mississippi’s aging junior senator, a wizened stalwart who would
never catch up to James O. Eastland in seniority, remained at Walter Reed, recovering from gunshot wounds sustained in a robbery that had taken place on his front lawn.

“He’s doin’ pretty well, from what I hear,” said LaRue.

Martha suddenly remembered that gunshots, like cancer, gave her the willies.

“Mr. Mitchell!” she shouted in the direction of the bedroom. “Freddy LaRooster is here!”

She liked to tease him about old amatory exploits. She imagined they weren’t very great, but kept poking in hopes of a revelation or two. Certainly he had never told her about Clarine Lander.

“How
does
Mr. President get everybody to keep workin’ for him without pay?” she asked, pointing toward the bedroom where her husband was still transacting Richard Nixon’s business. “Everybody’s half in and half out, still at it, even when they’ve got no more title and no more office. There’s my husband, and now there’s Cole Slaw.”

Chuck Colson had returned to private law practice, but he was still an official, if unsalaried, consultant to the president. Nixon could continue to get his advice and, if need be, still claim executive privilege for him.

“There he is!” cried Martha, as Mitchell at last emerged from the bedroom. His appearance, only five weeks after the inauguration, shocked LaRue. His hands were shaking and two gin blossoms had burst across his nose. His silvery whiskers matched the hair curling over his collar. It also looked as if this might be the second day for the shirt he had on.

Martha strode back to the window. LaRue noticed that her right hand was twirling a little red-checkered scarf she’d picked up from a table.

“Come on in,” said Mitchell, as if the bedroom were an office. “Bring your drink.”

LaRue noticed newspapers and legal pads, as well as the phone, lying all over the unmade bed. Mitchell lay back down on it, propping himself against the headboard.

“I talked to the president a couple of hours ago,” he said.

“So I hear,” said LaRue. “He’s supposed to be watchin’ a movie about now. You should be doin’ the same on a Friday night.”

Mitchell, whose mind was never completely off his wife, replied, “You know, she wants to go upstairs to that party.”

“Yes,” said LaRue, who’d seen the red-checkered kerchief. “But tell me the latest.”

Mitchell took out a pad with some notes. He pointed to the telephone. “If you listen to him,” he said, meaning the president, “you’d think it was all in the past. I could barely get him to discuss our little troubles. He’d rather talk about our new North Vietnamese friends.”

LaRue laughed softly. “Next thing you know we’ll be raisin’ money to pay off McGovern’s campaign debt.”

Mitchell looked at the notepad, pausing before he made a suggestion. “Maybe clemency for Hunt is not so outlandish. We’d take tremendous heat for a few days, but we could slip it into a bunch of other amnesties and pardons. Not for the draft dodgers,” he hastened to explain, knowing LaRue’s feelings on that subject, “but, say, for some GIs with Lieutenant Calley’s kind of problems.”

LaRue managed no more than a skeptical nod. If it would keep himself out of trouble, the Old Man probably
would
pardon the draft dodgers, same as he went to Red China without a by-your-leave to the Formosans. It sometimes felt to LaRue that there were no deal-breakers anymore, no about-faces that weren’t beyond the pale. If the subsidy paid better than the crop, why plant?

“John, I don’t know about clemency for Hunt. It’ll intensify the investigation.”

“You’re probably right,” said Mitchell. “There’s only one way to really fix this thing, and I’m afraid you’re looking at him.” LaRue shook his head in protest.

“I can tell he wants me to come forward and take the blame,” said Mitchell. “Colson wants me to do it, too, and so does Haldeman. Just step up to some microphone and say I ordered the break-in. The Democrats will think they’ve solved that mystery where even the trial couldn’t. And they’ll lose interest in our little cover-up, because it will have failed.”

“There’s only one problem with that,” said LaRue.

Mitchell nodded. “The small fact that I never ordered the break-in.”

“I know you didn’t,” said LaRue.

“Who did?” asked Mitchell.

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I. I’d say it was Magruder. And so would Liddy, I’m pretty sure, if he decided to talk instead of playing the tough guy.” The lead defendant at the burglars’ trial had winked theatrically at Jeb when his despised former boss at CRP entered the courtroom to testify, not very forthrightly, last month. Liddy had wound up being convicted along with McCord, and could expect the longest prison term of all once the judge sentenced everybody, including Hunt and the Cubans, a few weeks from now.

“But why would Magruder even think to bug the DNC?” asked Mitchell. “Why would it even be on his mind?”

“It makes no sense,” said LaRue. “And Jeb’s not going to admit anything to you, or to me, any more than he’s going to admit it to a jury. Not with four kids who could wind up seeing their daddy go to jail.”

After a pause, Mitchell said, “I’m not sure I’m ready to do it.”

LaRue looked at his blotchy face and supine posture and thought he didn’t look ready to do anything.

“Aside from everything else,” Mitchell continued, “she’ll kill me if I agree to be the fall guy.” He pointed toward the living room.

“Hell,” said LaRue, “I’ll kill you, too.”

He wondered, when he caught himself using that expression, if his partner in conversation might be thinking,
And that’s more than a figure of speech to him
. But Mitchell looked at him and said nothing. LaRue was, he supposed, being “paranoid”—that word the Old Man’s enemies loved to toss around. But this momentary fear, just a second or two of social awkwardness, stemmed from a genuine terror, his unquenchable dread that the shooting in the duck blind, years ago, had been something other than an accident; a catastrophe brewed by drink and dark, deliberate impulse.

Mitchell had said no more than “hell of a thing” when he first heard about the incident from LaRue, during some otherwise casual talk of their childhoods. By that point LaRue had already come to understand that Mitchell didn’t especially care what a man’s secret was, so long as he could keep it; but LaRue was keeping a secret he didn’t fully know himself. The whole truth of what had happened up in Canada was probably knowable even now—and had been so for fifteen years—but there
was sufficient trouble in this room without straying toward an old mystery that no prosecutor was pursuing.

Mitchell at last spoke. “The only thing to do right now is keep a lid on it and get ready for the Senate hearings. The president did manage to see Howard Baker the other day.”

LaRue frowned. He didn’t think the investigative committee’s ranking Republican—Everett Dirksen’s son-in-law or not—was likely to provide much protection.

“The president’s strategy,” said Mitchell, “is to look as if we’re cooperating even while we claim executive privilege for everybody down to the janitor. And, oh yeah,” he remembered to add, “the president says we’re supposed to draw everyone’s attention to ‘the good things.’ ”

LaRue smiled. “Colson says the return of the POWs equals one thousand Watergates.”

“If that’s his idea of math,” said Mitchell, “I’m glad he isn’t running NASA.”

The president’s hopes for joyful distraction were getting him involved with every detail of the prisoners’ release: checking to see that all the wives had orchids to wear as their men got off the planes; picking just the right entertainers—cornball was okay, but not too ancient—for the welcome-home evening at the White House. LaRue had heard how the Old Man choked up, nearly sobbed, the other day when talking to what he now called his “peace cabinet” about the staunch Nolde family, whose father had been the last American to die in the war.

“Speaking of Colson,” said Mitchell, lifting his glass from its place on his chest. “He thinks we might be able to get away with clemency for Hunt if we just hold off on it until the holidays. Make it a merciful gesture.”

LaRue laughed. “Mercy: the president’s Christmas specialty. We can drop it on Hunt from a B-52.”

“But it’d be too late,” Mitchell said with a sigh. “This Hunt character is likely to blow long before that. Which is why our friend Dean says you and I have got to get busy raising more money right away.”

LaRue nodded, depressed that they’d arrived at the matter he’d come to New York to discuss. As it was, Mitchell seemed eager to avoid it for just a little longer by citing more of Nixon’s own avoidance behaviors.
“You know, he’s been telling Haldeman to see about getting King Timahoe bred.”

LaRue laughed at the thought of a canine dynasty. “Easier than finding congressional seats for the sons-in-law.”

“He also wants Ray Price to see if they can’t change the procedures for compiling each year’s volume of presidential speeches; he’d like to see his off-the-cuff remarks and toasts get printed, too. And,” said Mitchell, pouring himself what LaRue hoped would be a last drink, “he wants Bebe to take charge of sprucing up the White House bowling alley.” He added, more forgivingly, “I suppose everybody needs to get away from this nightmare, even if it’s only down to the basement to roll gutter balls. They say Kissinger’s already made three trips to the zoo to see the pandas.”

LaRue watched Mitchell’s bald crown slip a little further down the headboard. There seemed no more time to waste. “John, word is that Hunt doesn’t feel any of his legal fees should come out of what he’s received. He thinks all of it—and it’s more than a small fortune—should go to ‘living expenses.’ I don’t think there’s a chance in hell we can raise enough money to satisfy him.”

LaRue had never told anyone, not even Mitchell, about his rendezvous with Dorothy Hunt on the day of the plane crash. But he had by now disbursed to Hunt’s attorney nearly all the money that had sat for those hours in the airport locker. And each night he still struggled to push from his mind the thought that there’d been a connection between the cover-up and the crash.

He now found himself wondering whether not just Mitchell but all the Mitchell men—including Jeb and himself—would soon be cut loose. But there was no time for speculation. He needed to get Mitchell focused on Hunt and the money. If that’s where things came apart, they were all goners.

From the living room came a sudden happy shriek, followed by an equally loud cry of disappointment. “Oh, GODDAMN and GLORIOSKI!”

Martha came to the bedroom door to explain: “I thought it was Jackie down below. But it’s just some big old bouffant copycat.”

“Take her upstairs,” Mitchell gently urged LaRue, once Martha
returned to the living room. “To the Kennedy party. They’ll love having her, trust me. She’ll be more fun than a girl coming out of a cake—even for Teddy.”

LaRue appeared hesitant.

“Don’t worry,” said Mitchell. “I’ll be here when you get back.”

Martha insisted that crashing the party was the farthest thing from her mind, but LaRue had no trouble getting her up to the Smiths’ apartment. In fact, while putting the checkered kerchief around her neck, she suggested they take the two flights of stairs, lest the surprise of her entrance be blunted by an elevator ride shared with other guests.

LaRue felt as if he were entering the party with a live cheetah; there were gasps all around when they came in. He saw no sign of the birthday boy, but Patricia Lawford, Kennedy’s sister, came straight over, accompanied by what LaRue took to be some good-looking fag in leather boots. John Lindsay, who’d kept his black tie but added a cowboy hat, also approached Martha to introduce himself.

She smiled with a mouth so wide open you could have put an apple in it. “I did
not
have to become a Democrat in order to get in here!” she shouted, extending her hand to the mayor, whose switch from the Republicans last year had done his pursuit of the presidency no good at all.

A waiter bowed slightly to Mrs. Mitchell and offered her a bottle of Lone Star beer, the theme party’s designated beverage, but she refused it. “Martha wants a nice tall Dewar’s, honey—lots of ice, no water.”

Stephen Smith came over to tell her she was most welcome, and one of Ethel Kennedy’s kids began snapping pictures. Martha draped her arm over anyone who wanted to pose with her, and LaRue began getting nervous.

She pulled him down onto a couch and pointed, with her drink, to a gaggle of miniskirted young women. “The boiler-room girls?”

LaRue wasn’t sure what she meant.

“The ones who were up on Chappa-Q-tip, or whatever it’s called. I’ll tell you one thing, honey. If this Supreme Court had come to its senses a little earlier, the guest of honor, wherever he may be, would still have a
future
.”

“How so?” LaRue responded.

“
Abortion
, honey,” Martha explained. “It’s been legal for the last month, or have you only been payin’ attention to the
earth-
shattering matter of who picked the lock on the Democrats’ clubhouse?”

LaRue had learned never to use the word “logic” when seeking clarification from Mrs. Mitchell; it inflamed her. So he asked instead for the “connection” between abortion and Edward Kennedy.

“You don’t think that drowned girl wasn’t pregnant? Well, I’m tellin’ you that she
was
, and that we’re movin’ toward a world where that won’t any longer be such a big ole catastrophe. But that was
not
true three years ago. Tell me, Freddy LaRooster: Did you ever pay for one of those operations? Or fa-
cil
-i-tate one?” She drew out the last word, as if mocking the jargon of Magruder and the junior executives.